had retired so many years ago that he still used terminology from the days of the franco-prussian wars or other ancient conflicts. Yet the wise old man was not so very wrong, the proof being that, the following day, business associations were quick to bring their well-founded anxieties to the government's notice, While we unreservedly and with an unwavering sense of patriotism support the energetic measures taken by the government, they said, as being a necessary campaign of national salvation to oppose the harmful effects of thinly disguised subversive acts, allow us, nonetheless, and with the greatest respect, to ask the competent authorities for the urgent issue of passes to our employees and workers, at the risk, if such a provision is not made at once, of causing grave and irreversible damage to our industrial and commercial activities, with the subsequent, inevitable harm this would cause to the national economy as a whole. On the afternoon of that same day, a joint communique from the ministries of defense, the interior and finance, expressed the national government's understanding and sympathy for the employers' legitimate concerns, but explained that any such distribution of passes could never be carried out on the scale desired by businesses, moreover, such liberality on the part of the government would inevitably imperil the security and efficacy of the military units charged with guarding the new frontier around the capital. However, as a demonstration of their openness and readiness to avoid the very worst problems, the government was prepared to give such documents to any managers and technical teams who were judged to be vital to the regular running of the companies, who would then have to take full responsibility for the actions, criminal or otherwise, inside and outside the city, of the people chosen to benefit from this privilege. Assuming the plan was approved, these people would have to gather each workday morning at designated places in order to be transported in buses under police escort to the city's various exit points, where more buses would take them to the factories or other premises where they worked and whence they would have to return at the end of the day. The cost of these operations, from the hiring of buses to the remuneration paid to the police for providing the escorts, would have to be covered by the companies themselves, an outlay that might well be made tax-deductible, although a firm decision on this could only be taken after a feasibility study had been carried out by the ministry of finance. As you can imagine, the complaints did not stop there. It is a basic fact of life that people cannot live without food and drink, now, bearing in mind that the meat came from outside, that the fish came from outside, that the vegetables came from outside, that, everything, in short, came from outside, and that what this city could, on its own, produce or store away would not provide enough even for one week, it would be necessary to lay on supply systems very like those that would provide businesses with technicians and managers, only far more complex, given the perishable nature of certain products. Not to mention the hospitals and the pharmacies, the kilometers of ligatures, the mountains of cotton wool, the tons of pills, the hectoliters of injectable fluids, the many gross of condoms. And then there's the petrol and the diesel to think about, how to transport them to the service stations, unless someone in the government has had the machiavellian idea of punishing the inhabitants of the capital twice over by making them walk. It took only a few days for the government to realize that there is more to a state of siege than meets the eye, especially if there is no real intention of starving the besieged population to death as was the usual practice in the distant past, that a state of siege is not something that can be cobbled together in a moment, that you need to know exactly what your objectives are and how to achieve them, to weigh the consequences, to evaluate reactions, ponder the problems, calculate the gains and the losses, if only to avoid the vast mountain of work that suddenly faces the ministries, overwhelmed by an unstoppable flood of protests, complaints and requests for clarification, for almost none of which they can provide answers, because the instructions from on high had looked only at the general principles of the state of siege and had shown a complete disregard for the bureaucratic minutiae of its implementation, which is where chaos invariably finds a way in. One interesting aspect of the situation, which the satirical vein and sardonic eye of the capital's wits could not help but notice, was the fact that the government, the de facto and de jure besieger, was, at the same time, one of the besieged, not just because its chambers and antechambers, its offices and corridors, its departments and archives, its filing cabinets and stamps, were all in the very heart of the city, and, indeed, formed an organic part of it, but also because some of its members, at least three ministers, a few secretaries of state and under- secretaries, as well as a couple of directors-general, lived on the outskirts, not to mention the civil servants who, morning and evening, in one way or another, had to use the train, metro or bus if they did not have their own transport or did not want to submit themselves to the complexities of urban traffic. The stories that were told, not always sotto voce, explored the well-known theme of the hunter hunted or the biter bit, but did not restrict themselves to such childishly innocent comments, to the humor of a belle epoque kindergarten, there was a whole kaleidoscope of variations, some of them utterly obscene and, from the point of view of the most elementary good taste, reprehensibly scatological. Unfortunately, and here we have further proof of the limited range and structural weakness of all sarcastic remarks, lampoons, burlesques, parodies, satires and other such jokes with which people hope to wound a government, the state of siege was not lifted and the problems of supply remained unresolved.
The days passed, and the difficulties continued to increase, they grew worse and multiplied, they sprang up underfoot like mushrooms after rain, but the moral strength of the population did not seem inclined to humble itself or to renounce what it had considered to be a just stance and to which it had given expression through the ballot box, the simple right not to follow any consensually established opinion. Some observers, usually foreign correspondents hurriedly despatched to cover the events, as they say in the jargon of the profession, and therefore unfamiliar with local idiosyncrasies, commented with bemusement on the complete lack of conflict amongst the city's inhabitants, even though they had observed what later proved to be agents provocateurs at work, trying to create the kind of unstable situations which might justify, in the eyes of the so-called international community, the leap that had not yet been taken, that is, the move from a state of siege to a state of war. One of these commentators, in his desire to be original, went so far as to describe this as a unique, never-before-seen example of ideological unanimity, which, if it were true, would make the capital's population a fascinating case, a political phenomenon worthy of study. Whichever way you looked at it, the idea was complete nonsense, and had nothing to do with the reality of the situation, for here, as anywhere else on the planet, people differ, they think differently, they are not all poor or all rich, and, even amongst the reasonably well-off, some are more so and some are less. The one subject on which they were all in agreement, with no need for any prior discussion, is one with which we are already familiar, and so there is no point going over old ground. Nevertheless, it is only natural that one would want to know, and the question was often asked, both by foreign journalists and by local ones, what singular reason lay behind the fact that there had, until now, been no incidents, no fights, no shouting matches or fisticuffs or worse amongst those who had cast blank votes and those who had not. The question amply demonstrates how important a knowledge of the elements of arithmetic is for the proper exercise of the profession of journalist, for they need only have recalled that the people casting blank votes represented eighty- three percent of the capital's population and that the remainder, all told, accounted for no more than seventeen percent, and one must not forget the debatable thesis put forward by the party on the left, according to which a blank vote and a vote for them were, metaphorically speaking, one bone and one flesh, and that if the supporters of the party on the left, and this is our own conclusion, did not all cast blank votes, although it is clear that many did in the second poll, it was simply because they had not been ordered to do so. No one would believe us if we were to say that seventeen people had decided to take on eighty-three, the days when battles were won with the help of god are long since gone. Natural curiosity would also lead one to ask two questions, what happened to the five hundred people plucked from the queues of voters by the ministry of the interior's spies and who subsequently underwent the torment of interrogation and the agony of seeing their most intimate secrets revealed by the lie detector and, the second question, what exactly are those specialist secret service agents and their less qualified assistants up to. On the first point, we have only doubts and no way of resolving them. There are those who say that the five hundred prisoners are, in accordance with that popular police euphemism, still helping the authorities with their inquiries in the hope of clarifying the facts, others say that they are gradually being freed, although only a few at a time so as not to attract too much attention, however, the more sceptical observers believe a third version, that they have all been removed from the city and are now in some unknown location and that, despite the dearth of results obtained hitherto, the interrogations continue. Who knows who is right. As for the second point, about what the secret service agents are up to, that we do know. Like all honest, worthy workers, they leave home every morning, tramp the city from end to end, and when they think the fish is about to bite, they try a new tactic, which consists of dropping all the circumlocutions and saying point-blank to the person they're with, Let's talk frankly now, like friends, I cast a blank vote, did you. At first, those questioned merely gave the answers described above, that no one was obliged to reveal how they voted, that no one can be questioned about it by any authority, and if one of them had the excellent idea of demanding that the impertinent questioner should identify
